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Collective human distrust (and its associated mis-disinformation) is one of the most complex phenomena of our time. e.g. distrust of medical expertise, or climate change science, or democratic election outcomes, and even distrust of…
We present preliminary results on the online war surrounding distrust of expertise in medical science -- specifically, the issue of vaccinations. While distrust and misinformation in politics can damage democratic elections, in the medical…
What has been the impact of the enormous amounts of time, effort and money spent promoting pro-vaccine science from pre-COVID-19 to now? We answer this using a unique mapping of online competition between pro- and anti-vaccination views…
Parents - particularly moms - increasingly consult social media for support when taking decisions about their young children, and likely also when advising other family members such as elderly relatives. Minimizing malignant online…
We demonstrate the applicability of network embedding to vaccine skepticism, a controversial topic of long-past history. With the Covid-19 pandemic outbreak at the end of 2019, the topic is more important than ever. Only a year after the…
Anti-vaccination views pervade online social media, fueling distrust in scientific expertise and increasing vaccine-hesitant individuals. While previous studies focused on specific countries, the COVID-19 pandemic brought the vaccination…
Vaccine hesitancy has been recognized as a major global health threat. Having access to any type of information in social media has been suggested as a potential powerful influence factor to hesitancy. Recent studies in other fields than…
With the rapid increase in access to internet and the subsequent growth in the population of online social media users, the quality of information posted, disseminated and consumed via these platforms is an issue of growing concern. A large…
The COVID-19 pandemic brought upon a massive wave of disinformation, exacerbating polarization in the increasingly divided landscape of online discourse. In this context, popular social media users play a major role, as they have the…
The "Make America Healthy Again" (MAHA) movement has created a complex ideological ecosystem within online communities, where advocacy for healthier lifestyles and whole-food diets coexists with vaccine skepticism and anti-science…
Research into COVID-19 has been rapidly evolving since the onset of the pandemic. This occasionally results in contradictory recommendations by credible sources of scientific opinion, public health authorities, and medical professionals. In…
Calls are escalating for social media platforms to do more to mitigate extreme online communities whose views can lead to real-world harms, e.g., mis/disinformation and distrust that increased Covid-19 fatalities, and now extend to…
COVID-19 represents the most severe global crisis to date whose public conversation can be studied in real time. To do so, we use a data set of over 350 million tweets and retweets posted by over 26 million English speaking Twitter users…
The COVID-19 pandemic has been a global health crisis playing out in the age of social media. Even though the virtual environment makes interaction possible regardless of physical location, many of the most pressing issues during the…
Societies worldwide have witnessed growing rifts separating advocates and opponents of vaccinations and other COVID-19 countermeasures. With the rollout of vaccination campaigns, German-speaking regions exhibited much lower vaccination…
In this work, we study English-language vaccine discourse in social media posts, specifically posts on X (formerly Twitter), in seven years before the COVID-19 outbreak (2013 to 2019) and three years after the outbreak was first reported…
Ensuring widespread public exposure to best-science guidance is crucial in a crisis, e.g. Covid-19, climate change. Mapping the emitter-receiver dynamics of Covid-19 guidance among 87 million Facebook users, we uncover a multi-sided battle…
To address the vaccine hesitancy which impairs the efforts of the COVID-19 vaccination campaign, it is imperative to understand public vaccination attitudes and timely grasp their changes. In spite of reliability and trustworthiness,…
The rise of vaccine hesitancy has caused a resurgence of vaccine-preventable diseases such as measles and pertussis, alongside widespread skepticism and refusals of COVID-19 vaccinations. While categorizing individuals as either supportive…
Future societal systems will be characterized by heterogeneous human behaviors and also collective action. The interaction between local systems and global systems will be complex. Humandemics will propagate because of the pathways that…